Captain America & Crossbones 1

I am thoroughly sick of these pointless one-shot comics from Marvel – though despite saying ‘ONE-SHOT’ on the cover, there is a ‘next issue’ ad at the end, that being for Cap & Batrock, who apparently has a ‘k’ now. I know there’s a Cap movie this summer, so I figured that that must feature Crossbones, but not according to the IMDB cast list, so I’m at a loss to know why this comic exists.

It’s certainly not because of Cap’s involvement, as he isn’t in it, other than a couple of flashback panels. Instead it focuses on the villain Crossbones, a kind of Punisher without the good side. The story is about Crossbones being taken out of jail by some unnamed, presumably governmental, body, and sent in to some Eastern European war zone to collect some kid who is immune to some sort of werewolf virus. It’s all vague and with nothing much at stake at any point, for Crossbones or anyone else. It looks even more pointless coming out alongside the new Venom series, which again has the tough guy parachuted into dangerous situations for similar missions – but at least Venom is a major figure and we might care about Flash Thompson. We also get background on Crossbones, which is both uninteresting and unilluminating. I can only assume that the Cap movie means any proposals related to him are getting green-lit even when there is no discernible reason for them to be created.

Harms does his best with someone with no more to him than being a tough guy with big guns, trying to give him some smarts with the ruthlessness, but it doesn’t amount to much. There is one moment that I guess is meant to show some major tactical nous, but I think the artist fucked it up enough that I can’t see any point in his sacrificing someone who was fighting on his side.

I don’t quite get the art. There are some decent drawings and I like the rain, but there is some terrible pacing, and odd artistic decisions, for instance where Shalvey suddenly draws a CC Beck face with dots for eyes in the midst of the gritty action, which doesn’t help the mood.

This isn’t a terrible comic, but it’s certainly not a good one, and the headlining of a character not in the story is very dishonest. I wouldn’t mind if there seemed a purpose to it, a story that needed telling or something that altered a significant character, but there isn’t anything like that. One to forget immediately.